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The Year 2024, Intelligent Assistants, and the CITIA Roadmap

The Conversational Interaction Technology Innovation Alliance (CITIA) is a group of European organizations interested in the field of conversational speech technologies. On February 24-25, CITIA held its Roadmap conference in Brussels, Belgium. The purpose of the Roadmap conference is to accelerate research and innovation strategies for European public and private sector organizations in the area of conversational technologies.

I didn’t attend the conference, but I’ve taken advantage of the videos that have been posted on the CITIA Roadmap website.

Young offers rationale for why speech-enabled interfaces are likely to become more important in the near future. The more apps, devices, and “things” that become connected to the Internet, the harder it is for the average user to understand how to interact with them all. No one wants to learn to navigate dozens of individual user interfaces. Instead, we want a single, unified conversational interface that we can talk to. The ideal interface would be an intelligent personal assistant.

The technologies enabling these assistants are rapidly evolving. Young’s information lets him postulate that 2024 will be the year of the fully capable and fully conversational virtual personal assistant.

Young provides a brief synopsis of the technologies that make the optimal virtual personal assistant work. He touches on the areas of:

Speech recognition and speech synthesis

Semantic decoding and dialogue management

Belief tracking and natural language generation

Statistical natural language processing

Sentiment and emotional analysis

Young believes there is a huge market opportunity for intelligent assistants. He lists the companies that he sees as the “Goliaths” in the business and contrasts them to the current “Davids.” Quite a few of the Davids have already been swallowed up by Goliaths in acquisitions. Can you guess who the Goliaths are? How about the Davids? Take a look at Young’s presentation to see if you guessed right.

I’m not sure exactly what the CITIA Roadmap holds, but 2024 is less than a decade away. Regardless of the outcome, the journey towards optimized conversational technologies is sure to be an interesting one over the coming years.